


L'Asile

by YouTheWrite



Category: Kings, Kings (NBC)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-07-08
Updated: 2013-07-08
Packaged: 2017-12-18 01:48:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 1,773
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/874306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YouTheWrite/pseuds/YouTheWrite





	1. Sans-Souci Palace

A Perspex heel knaws at the rubber tabletop. Joseph wonders when she’ll go back to her pole. He protects the bubbles in his drink with his sweat-damp fist. A Perspex heel is now seen to be connected to a nylon leg, a flesh thigh, a leather hip. One of her acrylics goes digging for his jawbone. His soft face shows clear in the strip light sign - Eden’s. 

‘What did you ever do to wind up here in the shallows with me?’

Joseph’s sometime-rival Timothy chews on his streaked fringe from a tipped perch on a barstool. All of his spit goes into the endeavour. Joseph taps a counter-rhythm to the tape deck playing. Joseph tries to feel for an unfurling of petals inside his mind. How do you get rid of a stripper? 

She looks at him. She unsticks her lashlines by doing so, and powder falls off her crumpling leer. A man from an adjacent rubber-top close by kneads her bent ankle. She toes his hand away in disgust. 

Joseph moves his jaw out of her open palm. She extends a leg across the table. His skin keens and he crawls backward in his seat. His tongue swells, he’s always hated nylon.

‘Don’t run away, haven’t finished with you---yet.’

A fluted glass at the next table topples over and rolls, intact. Gold pours over the floor. There’s treasure, everywhere, and it’s tawdry, cheap and boiled, encased in oil. Katrina’s endless legs seem to flow and bend in impossible pulsations. She makes him sick. 

She sits forward, PVC creaks. ‘What’s the matter? Do I…intimidate you?’

She wants a yes to both questions, and that’s all wrong for an exotic dancer. She will not remain here for long. Joseph claws at his eyelid itching with perfume. He wills his mouth to open.

‘I came with friends. Last minute plan, I—look, you’re very pretty—‘

She winces. 

‘You all are, this room, it’s Paradise, but, but I—it’s not my scene, not my thing.’

Margarita gusts from somewhere. In profile she is Bardot. In front she is a porcelain doll melting in a blast furnace.

Katrina does not like silence. Eyes forward. She kicks out a muscle now cramping from crouching in conversation. A boom from the back. The velvet purple on the walls ripples.

‘You think you don’t belong?’ A piping snort. ‘No one does. Not here. I’ll be leaving soon.’

‘Where for?’

Katrina relaxes the lines at her lip’s corners, carefully etched in pencil.

Pussycat, Pussycat, where have you been? I’ve been to London,--

‘To visit the Queen.’

She lifts her ankle, bones heave and quiver. She just wanted someone to know.

‘You should come with me, when I go. Perhaps a palace is better suited for the little Virgin Prince of Paradise, too?’

Joseph unloosens. Katrina pours a smile out for him and rubs her ankle on her opposite calf. The exotic dancer, the four-and-twenty year old, the soon-to-be bride of J. Peter Ghent, pivots on her plastic heel to leave.

‘How about it, then? Altar Mansion? With a big silk bed.’

He scruffs his hair in response. Bed hair. See? 

Katrina snuffles into her sequinned shreds of clothes. It’s funny. She gives a royal wave. She jumps, leaps, acrobatic and flowing free like wine, to the next table. Perspex thuds and shudders. 

‘Don’t be late.’


	2. Roche-à-Bateaux

‘You shouldn’t play with a girl’s toys, Joseph. She’s bound to get mad, and--’

Claudia flicks Joseph’s earlobe. She rubs it and tuts in apology. How would a piercing look there? Let's put a hole through it.

‘She’ll bite.’

She makes a sound, gargled acid. Joseph wants to shake her. Claudia lets a coil of hair spring from her fingers and looks over her gathered masses. There must be another boy, another broken toy, somewhere. A teddy bear or a robot or a bouncy ball for Joseph.

‘Now, come on. Let’s get you out of this dark corner, handsome. Don’t say you aren’t, you know I hate it when you get all—ugh, blushy. Oh, you know what? You must meet Callum. He’s interning as a Steward for the Modern, his stepfather is on the Three Cities Committee for Visual Arts and a Premier Sponsor---and unlike some people, he always comes out to play when you call.’

She slides Joseph’s cellphone out of his hand and dunks it in a bowl of pink gin on a bamboo stand. She sashays under a dark archway, and she does not look at the models that huddle against the walls and hug their elbow bones. 

This is Joseph’s fourteenth time at Not So Blind, the Crown Prince’s favourite club in Shiloh. Claudia buys the club eleven times a year for an invitation-only costume party, twelve if she does well in her studies at the Deborah Institute for Law. An orgy will complete the evening. 

Her chosen theme for this evening’s Rooftop Ball is 'Pleasures of the Orient'. Her over-tight faux-kimono, red satin, embroidered gypsy moths, grips the muscles tucked into it. Claudia has wound sharp sticks into her hair. Joseph wishes he could be barefoot. 

He pulls back. ‘He wants me, too.’

A stutter softens her throat. ‘Please. You’re baby food. He didn’t get his pocket money this month, scraped his knee, lost his tiara somewhere in Altar Mansion.’

Joseph’s teeth glitter through his widening aperture. Claudia cuts him off before he can counter. This isn’t his game.

‘--so he comes to you for a kiss better.’

Claudia worries her tongue-tip in her mouth, chasing the taste of Jack. She’s forgotten his flavour. It’s been months now. Joseph isn’t sharing, and it’s not fair. 

‘But, you know, he’s all right now.' 

She tugs at the hair of a passing blonde socialite and pulls the ballerina, bohemian, bete-noire in for a teasing kiss. Joseph pretends to gag. She sneers at him. I always forget—that one doesn’t work on him. The ballerina spins away on her heels and the coins against her hips clink. Claudia wrinkles her brow and straightens Joseph’s collar. 

'We don’t need grown ups spoiling our parties for us. I had him first. Play nicely, Joe--’

‘—he’s enjoying this, you know that? We’ve got a fucked-up friendship, it's his doing, and he’s gonna gloat about it until—Kingdom Come, I guess.’

‘Oh, honey. It’s a wonder you ever get fucked.’

It is, in fact, a compliment. It comes fresh with a warm smile. Claudia likes Joseph. He doesn’t lie, doesn’t ask for favour or Claudia’s precious attention, he doesn’t show up uninvited. He makes newcomers feel welcome. He’s the hippo smiling benign from the muddy depths where her crocodiles thrash and writhe unseen behind him. She forgets that hippos get hungry when unfed.

Claudia tugs on her bespoke chain necklace. A padlock. She trembles her collarbone, dismisses a man who comes too close to her cheekbones with a single nail raised. She opens her cellphone and pricks it with numbers. Claudia smoothes a line down Joseph’s nose. 

‘You aren’t gonna let this go, huh? You know how I just adore you—but you can’t stay here, like this. I have my party to think about… it’s the only fun I get to have all to myself, you know that. So--here’s what we’ll do. I want you to go home, cry this out. Maybe come back around when you find someone else, okay? Because, you know—it’s my turn now.’

She snaps her phone closes and tucks in into her bra. She feels the shadow of her heavies at her back. She rolls her prominent shoulder blades for the benefit of a recent arrival now lounging at the bar, a patron of military tech from Ashkelon. Joseph waits for the names of the men sizing him up at Claudia’s sides. He’s seen this done before. Is this what its come to?

‘Now, here’s Balthazar, and here’s Caspar—my trusted associates. It’s their job to make sure you get out safely, ok? It’s time to go. Be careful---‘

Not So Blind closes for the night. Joseph lets himself up from a gutter stuck with condom wrappers and spat-out glass. The Buddha set up in the golden window winks at the distance he limps to get home.

‘---and don’t lose your way home, Joe.’


	3. Croix-De-Bouquets

‘It’s a revealing piece. Visceral and lush, and perhaps, forthright, but not without delicacy.’

Rose Benjamin rotates her good nature in Joseph’s direction. He straightens his back.

‘I’d like to know more about it.’ The Queen lets the hush burble back up to a chatter. 

‘I’d be glad to, your Grace.’

Joseph Lasile, Commended Artist of Shiloh’s Isiah Cup, and Commissioned Designer of the new State Park mural, tips with the weight of a camera against his fifth rib. Full film, unused. Jack has hit the city tonight.

‘I painted it by leaning it against the palace walls. It was partly an…installation.’

Joseph touches the canvas corner. 

‘My! I don’t doubt that you were roundly admonished by our guards.’  
‘My ribs still hurt when I breathe, your Grace.’  
‘Hmmm.’. 

Rose removes her glasses, then replaces them again. She licks a tooth clean.

‘What an onerous task, to transport your canvas to and fro.’  
‘I was so excited to finish it, I thought nothing of it.’

Rose pushes back her silk sleeves. Joseph lets a few seams of space out between them. A tip he’d picked up from an inside source. 

‘You are an outward thinking artist, Joseph. It shines through your work. I have known a great many painters, and most of them insular. In their pursuit of the perfect technique, the flawless composition, they lock themselves up, hide from the world, and so, tragically, they miss the flitting captivities that reveal themselves to us more than we often care to realise. ‘

‘---like, butterflies?’

She stops mid-reach. She can’t touch him.

‘Forgive me. I am sentimental when it comes to the Arts. I mean to say--' She smiles, and it's wolfish, Jack all-over.  
'It is a delight to see a man not afraid of a good distraction’.

It rained on Joseph’s work many times. Storms in the Capital meant he had to stop, pigment running in rivulets down his inner arms. Jack called the torrents that poured from Heaven ‘escape weather’, something to run into to run from bigger threats. The Crown Prince Jonathan Benjamin never saw Joseph’s installation piece, never raked over it, bristling blue with night ink. He made a different picture, shuddering against the damp back of the city’s finest print artist during the last eclipse, staining the walls of the Eastern gate. Open air, a performance piece. 


End file.
